Ramblings of a Conspiracy Theorist

When your children let you in on their secret plan for a surprise party for your wife’s seventieth birthday and you remember that you are seven years her senior, a ‘senior moment’ should not come as a major surprise. Still I panicked.

A friend had dragged me kicking into a conference on international health and justice that a friend of hers was organizing in Canada. I had a basic concept that I had mulled in my mind for a long time: to look at the health of the Palestinian citizens of Israel from the critical angle of equality and human rights. I submitted an abstract and received an encouraging response from the organizers. Then I realized that the conference coincided with my wife’s birthday. I apologized to my friend intending to withdraw my paper. She came back with a counter proposal: Let us do that through Skype. I agreed and submitted the full paper. The organizers came back to me asking for a photo and a brief bio. I submitted those and received further encouragement. Then communications ceased. I wrote an email to the technical expert in charge of the Skype linkage asking for technical assistance. No response. I started feeling uncomfortable.

The morning of the opening day of the three-day conference I woke up at dawn in our Lower Manhattan rented studio apartment sweating from a nightmare whose details I couldn’t remember except that a crowd was shouting me down for something I had said. I went to the kitchen to prepare my morning kick-start cup of instant coffee in hot milk. When I reached for the coffee container I couldn’t find the spoon that I was sure I had taken out of the silverware drawer. I spinned around looking for it when I realized that I was holding it in my hand all the time. I scooped a heaping of freeze-dried coffee from the container to find two cups of milk on the countertop, not one. My wife must have mistakenly left a full cup on the counter before she went to sleep, I thought. But both cups were equally cold. I poured one back in the milk container. I needed to run a reality check: I walked over to my desk to see if I had already placed my standard morning anise-flavored biscotti (our rented studio is just west of Little Italy) on a paper towel by my laptop to savor with my first morning coffee. I felt reassured not to find any. I rubbed my hand over my face: No, I hadn’t shaved yet. I regained my composure and didn’t start crying. With age we all become emotionally labile. I heated my cup of coffee and sat down to check my email. No response from my technical contact at the conference. I wrote a panicked alert to the dozen different people with whom I had been in touch about the conference including the friend who had lured me to this trap in the first place: “Help! I am being ignored.”

I didn’t share with anyone the familiar feeling that had started sneaking into my mind: I seemed to remember the name of one of the conference organizers as that of one of my former bosses at the head office of the Ministry of Health in Jerusalem. Could he have thrown a monkey wrench in the works, I wondered? Am I being intentionally sabotaged? Could the Mossad have laced something I ate or drank with a mind-altering drug? Is their reach that extensive? Had they infiltrated the Canadian public health field? Or is this Canadian-Israeli doctor acting on his own initiative to deny me a voice in this international forum? Might he volunteer to inform the Israeli embassy on my seditious thoughts and pronouncements expressed in my paper? And what consequences might this behind the scenes cat-and-mouse game have for me as I land at the airport in Israel? Should I already take the preemptive step of turning to the press with my story? During my public health career back home I had always avoided lurking in the shadows. My policy was to stay in the limelight: The moment I found out that my phone at the office was bugged and the few times that the Shin Bet sought to enlist my services I announced the information immediately to the local press. Would the New York Times publish my story if I went public with it? I should give Jonathan Cook, my international journalist friend a call. Or would it be wiser to wait till the conference was over and the Israeli thought police made their first move? Wouldn’t that be already too late? The NYT is sure to abide by Israel’s gag order on the matter once they put me behind bars. How can I communicate my plight to anyone from within my cell? I was extremely uncomfortable scrunched in the corner of the bare-walled constantly brightly lit 10x4-foot windowless cell. Perhaps if I lurch back with all my strength I could manage to tip the low wooden stool to which my feet and wrists are bound backwards and I would end up with my torso leaning against the wall to relieve the pain in my lower back from all the hours I had spent in this same position. I glance back first to the right then to the left to gage the distance from the corner: I can’t see that corner clearly. I probably would get jammed in some contorted position between the stool and the wall with my neck flexed at some ungodly angle till I suffocate. They surely have calculated that to the millimeter. And if I were to choke to death in that position, it would be another Palestinian prisoner suicide by hanging. Logical, isn’t it? Or a heart attack. Or whatever. That is never a big deal. Palestinians are in the habit of dying in and out of jail. What I really cannot take is the prospect of the postmortem at Abu-Kabier with those jerks making their sick jokes as they put away whole organs for future experimentation or for export. I have heard rumors about my colleague who headed the Forensic Pathology Laboratory trading in human organs for years. If he is still there I don’t want him to touch my corpse. I detest the guy!

Oh, boy! How did I get into this mess? I have been held incommunicado forever, it seems. I have no idea how long ago all of this started. I don’t even know if it is day or night. How can I reach anyone? My wife knows I love her too much to do this to her on her birthday. Damn if I am not confused! I need to let her know. The only way is to send her a message directly from my mind to hers. There is a name for that. But I can’t remember it. I can’t remember a thing. Not even her full maiden name. They must have drugged me, tampered with my mind. I shouldn’t have eaten that foul-tasting porridge but after starving me for so long they must have known that I couldn’t resist. I open my eyes wide and concentrate on messaging my wife by telepathy. Yes, that is its name, telepathy! I focus every last ion in my entire body on emitting the thought of my current state and location through to her mind. It flashes back off the bare wall nearly blinding my eyes.

The loud clanking of the lock on the metal door to my cell makes me jump further injuring my wrists and ankles. A new face I haven’t seen before: full Ashkenazi features with double chin and redundant fat folds over his eyebrows and along the sides of his cheeks. He growls and I say in total silence: “Easy, boy! Bulldogs aren’t my favorite.”

He swings his five-pound open right hand across and catches my left cheek squarely with full force. I spit out the blood straight in his face.

“Oh that is how you want to play this game, hah?”

He takes out a handkerchief from his pants back pocket and meticulously wipes his face clean. Then he places the palm of his hand on my face, as if sizing it up. I stiffen uncontrollably in anticipation of what will follow. That sends a lightening-like spasm down my left sciatic nerve that had started acting up again since they put me in the contorted shabih position. Mr. Bulldog ends his malicious patting of my cheek with grabbing the end of my moustache and giving it a sudden and violent tug. I curse under my breath. He flicks the wad of hair he has ripped out on the urine soaked floor, steps with his boot on it and spews a frothy stream of saliva from between his tobacco-stained front teeth aimed first at my displaced moustache then at where it sat only minutes before.

“I spit on your honor,” he says stating the obvious. “I spit on all the Arab scum. I spit on your Mohammad!”

He then follows with the foulest expletives in the Arabic language directed at the female members of my immediate family.

“Vanity, thy name is Arab,” he ends his tirade chuckling mockingly. “Sprucing with expensive Argan hair oil from Morocco, no less.”

I heave out the last spoonful of yellow bilious stomach content. He throws a quick left hook at my jaw. This time the blood soils his boot. He steps back, looks at it and shakes his head in disappointment. He orders me to lick it clean at the same time that he delivers a professional soccer kick to the imagined ball lodged between my collarbone and lower jaw. I gasp for air, lose my wind and black out.

As I come to I am astounded with curiosity: I expected him to heap the foulest insults on my honor. But how the hell have they learned such minutiae about my grooming habits? I know such tricks of the Israeli investigative trade: They want me to believe that they are omniscient, that there is no use hiding anything from them, that I might as well give up and admit everything.

“Not me!” I reassure myself under my breath.

“But I have nothing to admit,” I declare in garbled thick Hebrew that he doesn’t understand.

He tries to extract out the words by ordering me to spit out the three teeth he had knocked from my lower jaw. I cannot talk. Instead I feign fainting again. He delivers a parting full force solid kick to my side. I swear I can feel my spleen burst. Or is it my liver? Or my empty stomach and intestines? I wish I had a free hand to palpate my abdomen and make a more objective clinical diagnosis. I go under again, this time for real.

As I regain consciousness a diminutive Sephardi man, the same Israeli Ministry of Health boss whose name on the Canadian conference website made me suspicious, is wiping the blood from my face with a rag and apologizing for how “that Ashkenazi brute” has messed up my face. I realize that he has unshackled my legs. I stretch them this way then that way,

“We are both public health physicians. We should come to an amicable understanding,” Mr. Nice Guy tells me. “We can speak in Arabic if you prefer. Let us see if we can get over this snag in communication.”

“What do you expect me to communicate to you?” I ask, not really sure I can make out my own slurred words.

“We know you have been sharing information with an enemy agent. And you used to throw stones at our soldiers. But that was a long time ago. We won’t bring that up unless you force us.”

“I did no such thing!” I object raising my voice.

“See? You are very antagonistic,” he says gently touching the sensitive skin of my missing moustache with the back of his index finger as a gesture of reconciliation.

“But I participated on Skype. I wasn’t there physically. How could I’ve met anyone?”

“One thing at a time, my friend,” he says with a knowing smile. “At the conference it is your words and strange thoughts we want to hear. You said a lot that you shouldn’t have. You accused your own country of genocide, of fascism and of apartheid even when you didn’t use the exact nasty terms. And you tried to back your misinterpretations of our goodwill with statistics that you used selectively.”

“I used only official figures from the Central Bureau of Statistics,” I declare indignantly.

“But you twisted them out of their original context. We both are learned enough to know how to lie with statistics, aren’t we?”

“Speak for yourself, Boss!”

“And we know you met an enemy agent at a party and he asked you for a contact in Galilee.”

“Is that all you have on me, you SOBs?”

“Cool it! You know who is in charge here,” Nice Guy says. Then he smiles kindly “If you have more, I am all ears.”

“But the guy is a Jewish gay peacenik,” I say in amazement. “How do you manage to turn him into an enemy agent?”

“But where were you sending him?” Nice Guy asks instead of answering me. “And with whom was he going to meet?”

“I wanted to arrange for him to meet a communist nephew of mine on the occasion of the commemoration of the Nakba in the ruins of Lubieh the ruined Palestinian village half way between Nazareth and Tiberius.”

“You are an educated man,” he says with a condescending tone of voice. “Think about it. You should be able to set your own limits. You know when you are becoming an existential threat to Israel by thought or deed.”

“Do me a favor,” I say ready for reconciliation. “Just out of curiosity, how did you people find about the hair oil I use?”

“That is a secret trick of the trade,” he says and comes close to whisper in my ear. “I’ll share it with you if you share some of your friends’ secrets with us.”

The SOB wants to smear my name, I think to myself. He wants me to commit suicide once I get out of here.

My wife plants a gentle kiss on the side of my forehead:

“This is not comfortable for you, Honey! What time did you get up to work? Why don’t you go lie in bed?”

I lift my head from the keyboard. I must have rolled my head back and forth several times. There are several lines of gibberish on the screen:

Zsxdcfvgbhnjm,.//.,mhngbf …

Secret Thoughts of A Palestinian Teacher in Israel

The airport security apparatus’s routine act of strip-searching Ezies Elias Shehadeh, an Arab teacher in a Jewish school, has generated too much media noise including Israeli TV and radio reports and interviews and the main editorial in Haaretz http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/1.576995

Local Arabic language papers veered off from their focus on the earthshaking Nazareth mayoral election rerun destined to decide the future of the Middle East and the world’s balance of power and nuclear armament, all to report on the teacher’s claims of injured pride. At the risk of angering friends and foes alike, let me be the devil’s advocate in pointing out the obvious:

For one thing, Ezies exaggerates. What she underwent is the routine that Arabs have to put up with as long as they refuse to swear allegiance to Israel as a Jewish state. Let us not forget the special circumstances of this incident, an Arab woman put in charge of Jewish youth for two decades. This, of course, triggers caution in the minds of all sane security officers. All they did was to have the woman take her clothes off and to feel around her arms, legs and scalp for explosives worn as hairpins or jewelry or as a chastity belt. You go figure what a sick Arab mind can concoct. In other sensitive circumstances requiring caution, such as in high security incarceration facilities, all body cavities are inspected including the performing of rectal and vaginal exams. We didn’t do anything of the sort to this woman though the risk we have to weigh, that of endangering Jewish lives, far outweighs such security infractions as drug smuggling in suspects’ orifices.

And this Ezies is upset because she was the only one in the entire group, students and teachers, who got the extra security inspection. You look at the woman in the picture in the paper or on your screen on the Internet and you realize what must be going through her mind. She must delude herself, as she manages to do to most readers, that she is a westernized female. Think for a moment how an Israeli Ashkenazi woman trying to pass herself as a Moslem Arab in Lebanon, Syria or Iraq nowadays would fare. I for one wouldn’t trust her. And lack of trust was all that we displayed towards Ezies. She must have forgotten the favor our government has just done her community, the Christian citizens of Israel. We passed laws designating them as our favorites, our pets, the least despised among the non-Jews in the country. We openly declared them non-Arabs. And the woman still complains!

And this sham of Ezies trying to pass herself as a western woman has a wider implication than first meets the eye: Think for a moment how much media time and how many newspaper pages we would have wasted had we paid equal attention to every Arab man or woman who underwent close scrutiny at the airport. We do that regularly day in and day out without anyone making a fuss about it as long as the subject is some old Moslem woman wrapped in hijab or an old Palestinian man donning a kufiyah. So what if they miss their flight? It is our airport and our security that counts. Think how much more is the damage that one such terrorist can cause. When was the last time that a Palestinian woman in the image of a modern Western model exploded on an El Al plane, you ask? Every day is my answer. It is what goes on in their sick minds, not what they actually do, that worries us.

Let us put ourselves in the shoes of this Arab teacher at a Jewish school: She must ask herself why do we have separate educational systems. And if separate, why do Jews decide on our curriculum and policy issues. And if separate, why blatantly unequal? She and the likes of her must think that their children deserve the same as ours.  She teaches at Tirat Carmel. Just join me for a tour inside her mind, please. The woman knows that this town on the beautiful mountainside overlooking the Mediterranean shore just south of Haifa was once, in the lifetime of her parents, a prosperous Palestinian Arab village. And yet she and her family couldn’t buy a home there and gain acceptance in its current Jewish milieu. And she knows just as well as we do that many stone homes in the town were built by Palestinians who are now unwanted refugees in South Lebanon or being starved in Yarmouk or, at best, are internally displaced, Present Absentees, who are transparent to Israel’s justice system. Believe me, when we think about it, what the Palestinians have forced us to do to them is enough to turn them all to terrorists. Regardless how flashy or wide Ezies’s sunglasses are, she remains a suspect. We have to remain on guard for the likes of her as long as she and her ilk deny us peace in our promised land, our Jewish only state. It is them or us, believe me.

One Palestinian man’s reading of Susan Abulhawa’s "My Voice Sought The Wind"

I am no romantic poet. Yet Susan Abulhawa’s first published collection of poems (My Voice Sought The Wind, Just World Books, 2013) slices directly to my heart. Like her, I once wrote poetry in Arabic. A group of us, high school friends in Nazareth some of whom went on to become ‘real poets,’ put out an occasional handwritten pamphlet of poetry. And like Susan, my cultural exile robbed me of the finesse and flare of my mother’s tongue. I must admit though that, unlike her, I don’t suffer any phantom pains where it once sprouted in my heart. It was too long ago.

Susan opens with an ode to olive oil, the cure-all salve for all Palestinian wounds and the explosive charge in our mystical weaponry. I inherited some ancestral olives and a multi-millennial olive stands in my front yard. I drool reading Susan’s recipe:

And without bread or Za’ater, dip your finger in this oil

Press it between your tongue and palate

Do it again

Until you hear the primal calls of an earth packed

  beneath boot steps and tank treads

And it will haunt you with an unexpected song

I warble to the song in my heart and tears of joy flood my eyes.

I come to the second poem, ‘Black,’ where Susan addresses a very personal issue. Openly! She names names and recalls pain and humiliation. She looks in the mirror and has a dilemma: Are we white or black? European or African? Palestinians of my age are not used to our national poet, the late Mahmoud Darwish, describing his nose as “fucked up” though it actually was.  Have some shame, woman! You must watch your language if you want me to nominate you as Darwish’s rightful heir. But by God, despite her loose tongue, or perhaps because of it, I am drawn to the black side in her conundrum where she doesn’t miss a step. She is up front, powerfully pointing her finger, calling a spade a bloody spade, and hitting the mark every time. It doesn’t pay to be bashful in identifying the European as our collective rapist:

            A European took my grandma’s house

            Painted my country white

            Kicked us out to the cold curb

            Killed our neighbors

            Cut my brother’s balls off

            Motherfuckers fucked my mother

            Then dragged me by the hair

                 and told me I needed liposuction

    And a nose job

… dug up my ancestors bones

Built a “Tolerance Museum” over their graves

Moreover, she doesn’t shy away from taking on

“My Arab brethren (who)

Considered me human ONLY

After I got a USA passport.”

Finally Susan declares for Black:

I am Palestinian

And in the blue and bruise of my heart

I am become Black

Because Black is beautiful

And the beautiful in me

Is Black

It is difficult to skip a line in this slim collection of hard hitting, highly charged poems. They, every one of them, come alive for me as I savor their Palestinian flavor and universal truth. I find myself wrestling, almost physically, with one evoked image after another. None is barren enough not to hold my attention and force my immersion in it. I wipe my tears and struggle across Susan’s Ramadan in exile and her brief homage to Mahmoud Darwish, the other “Voice of Palestine”:

            We saw you tear off your limbs

            To pass through the narrow passage

            Now you know

Where birds fly after the last sky

Next, aroused from a fitful sleep, I come to “The Siege” and shed copious tears again. First I manage to cope with Suraya whose “poetry assembles as dreams” and with Mjahid, the Palestinian gladiator who

            … looks upward

            And plays his oud to

            Hang the stars back in place

            After the sky has fallen.

But when I get to Laila and Yousef, the separated Gazan lovers who have their

            Eyes upon the same empty moon

            And sky devoid of promise

            The winds caress her cheeks

            And, miles away, wrap around him

Until their fingers find each other

Inch closer.

Interlace

And they hold hands

Across sky and wind and moon and miles

I am vanquished again. I take a cold shower to quell the tears in my red-shot eyes. I manage to recoup my tranquility. I eat breakfast with my foreign wife and get back to Susan’s “Sister Palestinian I” where I find myself taking things personally. The woman knows how to appeal to a Palestinian father’s sensibilities:

            When your father, king of his castle,

                was forced to sleep on dirt

            You served him coffee and scrubbed his feet

                to save his pride

That really works for me. But, God damn it, why do you have to be so bitchy? I didn’t have anything to do with all of that

The day you played hopscotch

When they pulled the land from under your feet

I had nothing to do with it

When your mother went mad and died with anguish (when)

Your tears watered a refugee’s garden

I never forced my daughter into an arranged marriage. I never raped or hit my wife nor ever claimed that European women were more “exciting fucks.” I never abandoned my wife to prostitution. And I never forced “the heart break of an empty orgasm” on anybody. You forgot? I am your brother! And they’ve cut my balls off. Take all of your insults back! Right now! Or, by God, I will go back on nominating you!

When I cool off I move on to “Sister Palestine II” where my detractor takes a well-deserved swipe at our common enemy, the Israelis colonizing our country,

a country siphoned from our veins

where the hills of God are carved and paved

and apartheid metastasizes into the wadis

through the sanasil and precious groves.

But, Susan, you got mixed up: Lena didn’t commit suicide. She was shot in the head by Israeli soldiers. They even confiscated her poster. You must have forgotten; you were only a little child then, a first-grader.   

And Ahmad: Do you mean Muhammad Al-Durrah’s surviving baby brother in our every home?  He is a fine young man now. He graduated from college. Don’t you go on shaming him with “shivering in his own piss.” He needs your moral support as his older sister. We have to continue dressing each other’s wounds. Don’t remind him of failures. It was only an occasional accident. We all did it at the time.

Was it the spider web in the sky, the

White phosphorus death?

Or the sonic booms?

Whatever! Just sing him some Fairuz songs or one of Rim Banna’s Palestinian lullabies.

Now I come to “Wala” and am totally stumped. What comment can one make about verity itself? I dwell on it once then again and again. I go online and listen to Susan’s rendition of it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUIqhxMdffE and watch the accompanying superb video many times.  This is the stuff of magic, of addictive poison. All I get from seeing it is the urge to shoot up with it again. It must be the trance the mystic achieves with self-flagellation.

I am that man,

The man you would have been

The man you should have been

Out there

Riding the family steed

The thoroughbred mares your grandfather

Raised and nurtured and loved

In a Palestine

Un-raped

Un-stolen

I battle the daily routine of insult and injury to access my hard labor camp. How can they do this to me? I haven’t seen my three children awake in months. I don’t have the cash for cigarettes. All that my loving wife can prepare for me is

A jibneh sandwich

With cucumber

In a plastic bag

Clutched in your callused laborer’s hand

And it never survives the five hours in the cattle holding pen where we are reduced to animals stampeding and trampling each other to death before I am allowed to escape.

But

You are out of the line

Fifteen men between you were pulled aside

And you tried not to look

Not to hear the one begging

Don’t hit me

I make it to where I seek to serve the settler masters. You never knew, of course; I was too ashamed to admit it even to my wife. But my “Zionist settler boss-man” has been putting me to work on “my Jiddo’s farm” where his Jaffa orange grove in Kufr Huj once thrived.  As you know, today the boss-man shouted insults at me:

Wala

Mish hon el yom

Not here today

Boy!

And all you can do is thank Allah that your

Wife and your babies are not

There to hear them call you

Wala

It is sweet of you Susan to keep that one just between us, not to have them insult me before my wife and children, not to rub my face in the dirt again. And I appreciate letting me keep the faith: I still have it in me to thank God for little favors. Many brothers and sisters have tired of thanking Him, Allathi la yushkaru ala makruhin siwah-- no other but him is thanked for hateful matters.

I shall stop here. I am emotionally drained, exhausted. Let others handle your love affair with Neruda and the section where we gain a peek at your vicarious life and family affairs. Others may understand better your controlled anger at “The Way Things Are.” It is enough for me that I tried to answer the accusations you flung against me, your Palestinian brother. I tried to do it without raising your ire. I don’t want to harm our common cause with factionalism over internal issues.

It was not politicians or media moguls who first turned the tide against the massacres in Vietnam or who freed South Africa. It was men and woman of conscience who did that: poets, writers, pastors, singers, actors, dancers, comedians and all sorts of artists and intellectuals. This week I saw Annemarie Jacir’s film “Lamma shuftak.” At the MOMA, no less! Believe me, change is in the air. And it is brave people like you and the courage of the likes of those in charge of Just World Books that give us hope.

There is a job to be done. My age group couldn’t have done it. But we are ready to help. We both are fallahin and know the spirit of collective action. Once we knew how to do it in facing nature’s disasters and in dealing with its gifts of plenty in our fields. Let us all join together and kick ass, as you would say.

Note: This review was first published in Palestine Chronicle.

Thomas Friedman Occupies the BDS

Thomas Friedman is in Ramallah on a mission. Apparently he has to sell the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement to the Palestinian National Authority. On repeated occasions the PA had announced it does not support the BDS campaign launched in 2005 by Palestinian civil society including labor unions, NGOs and student groups. The efforts of so many Palestinian volunteers and their international supporters are currently snowballing at a worrying rate, a much faster rate than the boycott against Apartheid South Africa did at a comparable time. It has become a veritable popular movement across the world. But Friedman ignores all of that and announces in his piece  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/05/opinion/friedman-the-third-intifada.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20140205

“But this Third Intifada isn’t really led by Palestinians in Ramallah. It’s led by the European Union in Brussels and other opponents of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank across the globe. Regardless of origin, though, it’s becoming a real source of leverage for the Palestinians in their negotiations with Israel.”

He thinks he can bribe all the BDSers by using the glorious name of “Third Intifada” and dumping it all in the lap of the PNA. What a low blow! What cleverness! He apparently doesn’t realize that a major worry of BDS activists that the PNA may undercut their achievements by signing some agreement that can serve as a fig leaf. Note that Friedman doesn’t mention BDS in his article, not once. He finds all kinds of culprits to blame it on, from Nelson Mandela to Ahmadinejad, but not Palestinians other than his hosts in Ramallah.

The man is a real con artist: Not only does he try to obfuscate the origin of the successful movement and the extent of its success but he tries to cut it down to acceptable proportions. Not only is BDS never mentioned by name but also it is pared down to one negotiable issue: the West Bank occupation and the fate of the settlements there. No right of return and no equality for the Palestinian citizens of Israel, the other two integral parts of the campaign that add further universality and international appeal to it. To Friedman the only Palestinians are the PNA and the only issue for them is the fate of the West Bank settlers. Pressure the PNA enough to scuttle that and all is well.

Let us hope Friedman’s readers have read Omar Barghouti’s piece in the New York Times from last Sunday.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/01/opinion/sunday/why-the-boycott-movement-scares-israel.html?_r=0

The difference between real and imagined is clear.

Ariel Sharon’s World Legacy

There is a social taboo on cursing the dead. But in the case of Ariel Sharon, there is a general consensus that he was a brutal thug and people are saying that openly. I struggle to say something about the man without betraying my utter disgust with his legacy of warmongering and power grabbing. “Brutal thug” is the nicest descriptive I find in the kindness of my heart to fling at the man in parting. I look at the cherubic smile on his bulldog face in the picture and wonder what makes it evoke such revulsion deep in my soul.

The man had a physical presence that was difficult to dismiss, a corpulence of bovine proportions that lent credence to the Palestinian mothers’ usage of his name to threaten their misbehaving babies. I never met Sharon in person. Yet every time I saw him on TV I had the urge to use the standard Boy Scout trick when threatened by a wild boar or an angry bear: to project an expanded body image myself by spreading my arms up with a sheet or a coat hanging from them while banging vigorously on a pot to intimidate the wild animal and drive it back from me.

Then I get an inkling of a rationale for my hateful attitude: Sharon nearly tricked me into choosing to abandon my native home. My wife, an American citizen, and I had another option to living in Israel. With his rapid climb to prominence in Israel’s political life we made a well thought-out plan, or so we thought at the time: If and when Sharon gets to lead Israel, we would leave, we promised ourselves. When the time came and the man’s inevitable rise to Israel’s premiership materialized we sat and reassessed our commitment again. Quickly, we concluded that in making our previous calculations we had evidenced undeserved trust in the Israeli electorate. Israel as a whole was becoming a sinister collective and it was a mistake to have placed our trust in it. In weighing our steps we had made a mistake in giving the reins of decision-making on our future to a society that defined itself as exclusive of us in the first place. We were not Jews and the vast majority of Israel’s citizens saw the state of Israel and its society as Jewish and understood that to exclude the likes of us. Whichever way we looked at it and hard as we tried it was impossible to balance the contradiction of a “democratic and Jewish state.” It just was too heavy at the base for us to balance it on its head so that we would fit in it. It left us out in the cold. So how had we dared put our future in the hands of an apartheid society mired deeper by the day in the violence, blood and slime of occupation of our brothers and sisters. The sweetest recurrent wet dream of Zionism had always been to dislodge me off of my native land. And here I was putting the decision on my sacred right to live on my land in the hands of Sharon and his fascist fans. What an illogical decision had my wife and I made! We reversed that decision on the spot and set ourselves a much more challenging goal: to help expose the falsity of Israeli democracy to the world and to challenge the world to meet its moral responsibility vis-à-vis the lie.

It can be said in Sharon’s defense that he was innocent of any sense of right or wrong. His acts of violence seemed to be like those of an unthinking being, not unlike a slug’s unawareness of what its actions might do to others. Or even like those of an inanimate object, an independent robot programmed to do harm. Not only that the concept of right and wrong didn’t count in calculating the outcome of its actions but that such concept wasn’t there in the first place. It gave the man a certain appearance of innocence, almost like a child’s. Except that a child displays readiness to learn, a quality that invites lecturing, reprimand and punishment. Here there was a self-evident uselessness of such interventions. The man did what he did because violence and harming others was in his nature not because he willed it.

Blood didn’t seem to soil Sharon’s hands. Hiis hands were always that way; it was part of his constituency. Very early in his military career, the grand master of Israel’s independence saw through Sharon clearly and advised him to abandon his studies and to pursue his natural bend for killing. Sharon never forgot or changed the track that Ben Gurion set him on. He went on from Qebya to Gaza to Sabra and Shatilla to Jenin, When his murderous legacy clashed with accepted international standards of behavior, the world had to adjust itself to his reality: Israel’s Labor government under Barak sent a thousand policemen and fired 1.3 million bullets in October of 2000 to guard him on his provocative visit to Al-Aqsa grounds. Belgium changed its laws to get him of the hook of Sabra and Shatilla war crime. And president George W. Bush praised him as a “man of peace.” Sharon just took it all in his stride and continued killing Palestinians and Arabs. His admirers saw all of this in a positive light. To them he was not a scary beast but a step beyond in lacking blame: To them he was a machine: They called him “The Bulldozer.” In my imagination the apt simile took hold when he, in the form of a D-9 Caterpillar, went over Rachel Corrie with the blade once then reversed to verify the kill.

Clearly, the man lacked a conscience. But what does that say about all the world leaders and media commentators who continue to pile accolades on the dead war criminal? Perhaps it just shows how low the world had sunk in its efforts to observe proper diplomatic protocol. But what does it say about Israel as the country that had chosen him as its leader and that continues to follow in his path to this day. After all, Netanyahu and Lieberman are practicing what Sharon had preached. Except that Sharon’s style of random violence is now being codified as Israeli law and adopted as mainstream policy.

All in all, John Kerry, the American Secretary of State, summed up the man’s legacy accurately: “Ariel Sharon’s journey was Israel’s Journey.” With America, as personified in its current president for example, spouting off its automotive mantra of “Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, has the right to defend itself,” Sharon’s journey has become America’s journey as well. It is on its way to becoming the world’s journey.